Betrayed (16 page)

Chapter Thirty

W
hat are you
doing here?”

That was the question of the hour, Byron thought. He’d gone straight from Bill’s to McKenzie’s front door, and now that he was standing there, he hadn’t the foggiest idea what to say to her.

“Byron?” Her blank expression changed to one of concern, and it was that look on her face that snapped him out of his trance.

“I wanted to talk,” he said. “Can I come in?”

She looked at him suspiciously for a few tense moments before speaking again. “I don’t think we have anything else to talk about, Byron.”

“I met Nathan tonight.”

Those four short words zapped all the color from her face, and she stared at him in shock. What he wouldn’t pay to know what was going through her mind right now.

“I don’t understand…” Her voice had grown hoarse.

“I saw you with him at the restaurant we went to with Jewell a few weeks ago. I followed him,” Byron told her.

“Why would you do that?” she asked, gripping the sweater she was wearing.

“I was jealous,” he admitted.

“Why in the world would you be jealous? You…you…” She was so stunned, she lost her ability to form words.

“Please just tell me what happened when you first met him.” Byron was practically begging.

She opened the door wider, allowing him in. He didn’t question her; he just followed her into the living room, where she walked over to a window and stared out into the darkness.

“I told you about the crash, the one that put my sister in a coma when she was only fourteen. And you know that my mother blamed me for it. . .” When she paused, Byron made sure not to move a muscle for fear that she would clam back up. But she soon started speaking again.

“After four years of my mother’s bitter rages, drinking, and constant blame, I’d had enough. I felt guilty about being angry at her, at my sister, at the world, but I had to get away. I got a job at a small café, rented a room near the local college, and thought I was doing pretty dang well for myself. I would go visit my sister occasionally, but every time I did, my anger would build back up. My life had been hell since the wreck, and there were so many times I wished I were the one in that bed, the one oblivious to it all. But those thoughts gave me even more reason to feel guilty, because at least I had a life to live, while she didn’t. No matter what I did, I was always racked with guilt back then…”

“You were just a kid, McKenzie.”

“Don’t, Byron. I’ve heard that a million times. If you don’t let me talk, then I’m not going to be able to get through this.”

“I’m sorry. Please go on.” He wanted to reach for her, but he knew she was fragile and he wanted her to continue.

“When I turned nineteen, met what I thought was a sophisticated, beautiful man. He was ten years older than me, but that was all part of the appeal. He had this smile that seemed to light up an entire room, and he came into the diner for months, flirting with me, and only with me, even though there were far prettier waitresses working there.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Byron mumbled before shutting up again.

“Even though I was so young, I’d been living with trauma all through my teenage years. Impressionable years, or so they call them. I never dated — hell, I’d never even kissed a guy at that point. I was shy and didn’t know what to think about all of the attention I was getting from this man. So when he asked me out on a date, I just nodded yes. I couldn’t even get words to come from my mouth.”

Byron felt thwarted when McKenzie closed her eyes briefly. When her eyes were open, he could read her expressions like a book, and he didn’t want to be shut out right now.

She continued before he had to prompt her. “We went on several dates over the next two months, and I fell irrevocably in love with the man. Well,
irrevocably
isn’t quite the word, but that’s the way it seemed. He always walked me to my door, kissed me goodnight, and never tried to push it further than that. We would talk about sex, and at first, I was terrified to even consider it, but then the kisses grew a little longer, and I began feeling things inside me I never thought I would feel — sensations I thought only existed in romance novels. So I told him I wanted to try…you know…soon.” The words seemed to burn her as she spoke them.

“One night he took me to his house, or what I thought was his house. It was on the outskirts of town, big, expensive — the kind of place where real artwork hung on the walls, not just prints,” she said with a bitter laugh.

“McKenzie…” Byron was beginning to feel bad about forcing her to take this stroll down the ugliest possible memory lane.

She continued anyway and he didn’t stop her. “We sat down and he poured some wine, very good wine…” Another pause. And this time there were tears in her eyes again when she looked at him. “And then everything went black. When I woke up, I was in a big, horrible bed, lying…naked beside a man I didn’t know. My entire body hurt, and I was bruised all over. I was terrified. I slipped from his bed, found my clothes on the floor, threw them on, then quickly ran from the house. Nathan was waiting outside in his car.

“I thought we were dating, but it turns out that he was really just a pimp, a guy who made a lot of money at his job. He found inexperienced young women — of course, they had to be virgins — and he wined and dined them, made sure they were a perfect fit, a girl without ties, a girl who no one would ever believe if she cried ‘rape,’ and then he matched them with a john who would pay a lot of money for a night of…‘pleasure.’”

“Crap, McKenzie…” He should stop this, but he didn’t.

“The man I’d been dating wasn’t really dating me,” she said. “He was prepping me to be his next call-girl. When it was the first time for a virgin woman, he always got paid a lot of money, and then, after that first time, some of the girls stayed on with him. He paid them more than they’d make in their pathetic restaurant jobs, and his clients were…how do I put this?” She took a deep breath. “Men with a certain tastes, but men who could pay a lot for their twisted lifestyles.”

“Like the men you catered to at Relinquish Control,” Byron said. What the hell? Why would she have opened a place that provided services like that if she’d been through such a traumatizing experience? As if she could read his mind, she addressed that next.

“I took the blood money I had earned from him and I ran far away. It took me a couple of years, but I saved every dime, made a few very good investments, and then I got the idea for Relinquish Control. Not to take power away from women, but to give it back to them. My girls had nothing, and I saved them from the streets. I took the control away from the men who make women’s lives hell. Those men had to come to me, and they had to sign a contract, and my girls’ safety was ensured. I had pictures of the men, their ID, everything to identify them if one of my girls disappeared. The man who raped me got away with it. Nathan Guilder got away with it. I wasn’t letting other men get away with anything.”

“You can’t stop it from happening,” Byron told her.

“No. You’re right. I can’t stop it, but I saved a lot of girls. My escorts weren’t naïve, inexperienced little things. They were experienced and they chose to better their lives. None of them stayed more than two years. They saved their money, then moved on. Exactly like I did,” she said, lifting her chin, challenging him to call her a whore again.

“I…I…” Byron was at a complete loss for words.

“It’s fine, Byron. I get it. You assume that I’m a whore, that if I make my living a certain way, it’s because I’m insatiable. And to add to that, I didn’t make it exactly hard for you to get me into your bed,” she said, a humorless laugh escaping her lips.

“You were fourteen when you basically lost your sister, your mother and your father. I’m sorry if I’ve been harsh on you,” Byron told her.

He didn’t know what to think. He knew in his gut that she was telling the truth. But just because she’d been through hell didn’t mean that she was innocent. It just meant that she was a real person. That was something he could no longer ignore.

“I needed to make a lot of money. My sister’s care wasn’t cheap,” she said, laughing humorlessly again.

“Why didn’t you just let her go? By the time you opened the doors to Relinquish, she’d been in a coma for about ten years.”

She looked at him like he was a monster before replying. “You never give up on the people you love,” she told him sternly.

“No, but you can also forgive yourself for mistakes you made as a kid, and for making a mistake with this Nathan guy.”

“That’s really easy for you to say, Byron. You were born into wealth and privilege. Life hasn’t continually kicked you back down every time you tried to stand up again. In this world, you’re either a winner or a loser. After being attacked, I was determined never to be taken again, never to show weakness again, and especially never to be fooled again,” she said.

He read the message loud and clear. She wouldn’t play his games.

“Everything isn’t always as it appears to be,” he told her.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“We all have our pasts, and we all have our secrets.”

“I’m sure your secrets are about the maid forgetting to pack your lunch,” she said, instantly putting her armor into place.

He looked at her, sadness filling him. Did he really seem so cold? “What made you close the doors to Relinquish then?”

She paused for a moment before speaking. “My sister died. I no longer needed to make as much money and I wanted to finally live my dreams.”

“I’m sorry…”

“Don’t. I can’t stand generic apologies, or words that mean nothing. They are spoken so freely, so easily, and they are never meant.” She turned away again, and Byron knew he needed to think.

He turned and began walking toward the door.

“Why did you come here? Why did you ask this of me? Is it to prove that I’m worthless in your eyes?”

He could see she was close to falling apart. He should go to her, but he had to get his head clear. This was all too much. He’d learned too much today.

He turned back around. “I’m glad you told me, McKenzie. Sometimes you just have to trust.” How ironic that those words were coming from
his
lips. What a crock. He trusted no one, and he hadn’t for years.

“It’s fine, Byron. Go ahead and leave,” she told him.

Pain sliced through him at her words, but that’s what he was doing wasn’t it? He was leaving. It’s what he did best. Without another word, he slipped from her house. He’d made choices his entire life that affected him — and not in a good way. What was one more bad choice?

Chapter Thirty-One

M
cKenzie waited until
she was sure Byron was gone, and then she broke down. Everything inside her hurt. She had warned herself not to fall for this man, but she’d gone ahead and done it anyway.

Why? Would she never learn? How could she care about such a cold man? Just because he’d shown her a few glimpses of a real person beneath all that armor, it didn’t make him honorable, didn’t make him worthy of her love. Maybe that was just it. Maybe she would never find herself worthy to love and so it was easier to love a man who could never possibly love her.

She just had to remember that this was simply one more roadblock on a road with many roadblocks. It wouldn’t hold her back forever. She just had to take another detour.

When she went to bed that night, no more tears fell, but not much sleep came either. Her life wouldn’t ever be simple, but then who wanted a boring life? It was better to have ups and downs than to just exist.

She’d get past this. She just had to be strong. And she would be.

So when she walked into her office and found Byron there instead of Zach, she wasn’t in the most receptive of moods.

“How did you get in here?” was her only question.

“Zach let me in and then split. I think the man might have a slight crush on you, by the way,” he said as if he found it amusing.

“Is it such a shock that a man might find me attractive?” she asked as she stood three feet away from him. Enough was enough. They could have it out and then be done with each other.

“I would find it more shocking if men weren’t attracted to you,” he offered with a laugh.

“I don’t find you very funny, Byron. Why don’t you tell me whatever it is that you need to say and then get the hell out of my office and out of my life?” Her bravery was going to last only so long before she snapped.

“Fine. Just like that?” he asked. “You want me to just blurt it out?”

“I don’t say what I don’t mean,” she grated out.

“I’m in love with you, McKenzie Beaumont. I can’t sleep anymore without you next to me. I can’t get you out of my thoughts. I can’t function like a normal human being. I’ve. Fallen. In. Love. With. You.”

This made no sense. Although McKenzie thought he had just told her he was in love with her, he was almost yelling at her. The words and the tone didn’t match at all.

“In love with me?” she finally asked, her voice low, as if afraid of spooking him. “Did you say that you’re in love with me?”

“Before you retreat, or run away, or whatever it is you do when you’re getting too close to someone, let me finish. We both spook easily. We both have trust issues. But I know you care about me. I can see it in your eyes, and I can feel it in your touch, in the way you make love to me. I know we have something and I think we would be fools to throw it all away because we’re scared.”

He began pacing, not looking at her as he delivered his speech. She didn’t know what to say, how to respond to him. Not that he was giving her a chance to talk. Right when she opened her mouth to say something, he started speaking again.

“I know I can be blunt, that I come across cold. But I feel different when I’m with you. I want to laugh, to smile, I want to lie beneath the stars and stay there until we’ve counted them all. I want to give you the stars…” He ran his hands through his hair as he spun back around and then moved toward her, determination in his every step.

“Byron…” She tried to speak again, but he reached her and cupped her face with his hand.

“I won’t be my father. I won’t cheat or lie, or abuse. I won’t be like my mother. They were terrible to each other and they turned something that’s supposed to be beautiful into hate and ugliness. I thought that if I felt love, I would behave like they did. But love is a choice, and I choose to love you.”

Tears choked her as she looked into his eyes and saw the love shining in them. It was the first time she’d seen such strong emotion on his handsome face, and she couldn’t speak past the lump in her throat, so instead of trying to talk right then, she wrapped her arms around him, took his lips with hers, and tried to show him how she felt.

He grabbed her, deepening the kiss for several long heartbeats before he drew back, a mixture of passion and adoration burning in his gaze. It was more than she’d ever hoped to see.

“Don’t distract me, woman. I need to know how you feel,” he said, though he didn’t release his grasp on her.

“I love you, too,” she told him. “I never thought I could love anyone. I thought I’d locked that part of me away from the world, and then you stormed in and messed up my so-called perfect life.” Her voice broke.

“I don’t want to mess up your life. That’s not how this is supposed to go, McKenzie.”

“Don’t worry. Don’t worry at all. My life was terrible. I just didn’t see it until I met you. I didn’t realize that I was living in a world of beige when just around the corner there were exquisite colors waiting for me to discover. You make me feel emotions I’ve never felt before — good emotions — and I don’t want to let that go. I don’t want to live my life in fear, or even worse, live my life without any emotions at all.”

“Then we will grow together, McKenzie. We will learn how to trust and how to love to the fullest,” he promised her. “And we’ll do it in each others arms.”

“I will take you up on that, Byron Knight.”

McKenzie gasped when Byron lifted her into his arms. “What are you doing?”

“We’re going to celebrate somewhere a lot more private than this,” he said, carrying her down the hall and out of the building.

“Mmm, then hurry…”

She kissed his neck as he rushed to his car. After setting her inside, he circled around quickly, jumped into the driver’s seat, and he pulled her back to him.

“As long as you never stop doing that, Byron, I’ll be a very happy woman.”

“I can only promise forever,” he told her.

And forever is all that she would ask.